iheartscotch:Don't bring a bow to a gunfight. Unless, the gun is from the Middle Ages. Then, the bow has some advantages.

Actually, bows have advantages over most guns until you get up to the metallic cartridge era. The English Army of 1400 AD could have handily defeated the English Army of 1800, artillery notwithstanding, simply because they could have pumped more projectiles faster and at a longer distance than their descendants.

The reason bows were replaced by guns is that you could build bigger and more powerful guns that could penetrate armor, whereas with a traditional bow you run up against the physical limitations of the archer himself: It takes physical strength to pull a heavy bow.

Armored knights were the reason for such heavy bow weights back then. You had to have a heavy bow in order to shoot a thick, heavy arrow shaft with a heavy bodkin on the end at a decent velocity. Hunting bows back then didn't have as heavy a pull weight as war bows because they didn't need to, as deer and other game don't normally wear steel plate, so you could use lighter arrows.

So, what happened is that the effectiveness of the English longbow helped to spur increasingly more effective armor, until a point was reached where unless you got a lucky shot into an eye-hole or some joint in the armor, someone fully armored with the best plate was essentially impervious to even point-blank shooting by the English yeoman archers. This happened at Agincourt, where most of the French knights weren't actually killed by arrows, but by the archers using hand weapons like lead mauls and by the effects of crowd collapse, having been funneled into a narrow front by the English choosing the ground most advantageous to them.

Once it was plain that archery couldn't keep up with improvements in personal armor, but that the relatively newly developed gun could, then armies started switching over from crossbowmen and archers to guns. Guns had a few advantages over the longbow, the two most notable were the ability to penetrate armor, and the fact that they didn't require someone in excellent physical shape to employ them effectively. Another advantage was psychological: The fire, smoke, and noise of shooting a muzzleloader could be quite impressive and disconcerting to those who aren't used to it.

They also have a number of disadvantages, though: They are more expensive to manufacture than a bow, the ammunition isn't reusable, the smoke from shooting en masse can obscure your target, and at longer ranges, they are much less accurate against an area target like a group of opponents than a longbow. They can't be effectively used in wet weather*.

Once the writing was on the wall, the nobility stopped wearing armor. What was the point of purchasing and wearing very, very expensive and very, very heavy armor that limited your vision, mobility, and ability to fight hand-to-hand or on horseback if some peasant with an arquebus can drill through it?

At that point, archery could have supplanted guns quite effectively. You don't need a heavy 100 to 150+ lb pull bow to penetrate the wool uniform of a soldier from 1700 or 1800, a "low" weight bow of 50 to 60 lbs would work fine, and lighter arrows would give you the same effective range. Nor would training be an issue: It's relatively easy to learn how to shoot a bow at a large target like a mass of men. Certainly, you can get the basics down, assuming a reasonably fit person, in just a week or two of practice, or about the same amount of time it takes to become effective with a musket.\

So you could have employed mass archers shooting longbows of low draw weight against any army armed with flintlock muskets, and because of the advantages in effective range and rate of fire, such a force could have largely decimated any equivalent conventional musket-armed force they would have met.

*This applies mainly to matchlocks, but it also applies to a lesser extent to flintlocks, and to an even lesser extent to percussion guns.